


Ubbe, Ubbe, Toil and Trouble

by grayspider1974



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: F/M, Farting, Sexual Assault, accidental ingestion of a hallucinogen, tits
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-09-07
Packaged: 2018-12-22 05:16:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11960478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayspider1974/pseuds/grayspider1974
Summary: In which Ubbe attempts to restore peace and order to Kattegat and fend off famine in the Year of the Terrible Flatulence, and a Midsummer's Eve party gets massively out of hand





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In Finnish idiom, selling someone to the Russians means something similar to being sold up the river.  
> Under ancient Norse property laws (at least as recorded in the sagas) a woman only had a right to her late husband's property if they produced a child and if neither of them subsequently remarried...something I don't think the writers on Vikings even CONSIDERED when they wrote the past three seasons!  
> The chump who took over Norway after the Lothbrook dynasty was Harald Finehair.

Ubbe Ragnarsson had dreamt of being buried under an avalanche, and over his morning plate of herrings on toast he grimly contemplated the fact that today he would indeed be buried under an avalanche of work that was just as intimidating as the blizzard gusted in as Margarethe opened the shutters.  
"Meg, it's colder than a witch's tit out there! Close the shutters!"  
Margarethe stood on one foot, the other tucked behind her knee and goose pimples on her round pink bottom. She was a remarkably cute woman, but Ubbe sometimes found her tiresome. "You farted up the bed again, Ubbe! That's what you get when you eat beans!"  
"There's hardly anything to eat except beans," said Ubbe. "So learn to live with it. Now close the damn shutters and get back in bed!"  
Magarethe giggled and stuck out her tongue. "You can't make me, Ubbe! I'm a free woman now!"  
"Only 'cos I manumitted you. If you don't get back into bed right now, I'll re-enslave you and sell you to the Russians."  
Meg clapped her hands to her face in mock horror. "Oh please, Master! Don't sell me to the Russians!" but she crawled back beneath the fur and started doing pleasant things to Ubbe with her mouth. Unfortunately for her the beans that Ubbe had eaten the night before caused him to produce a tremendous fart just as things were coming to a head under the furs. Magarethe's head popped out from under the covers, gasping for air.  
"You're a pig, Ubbe!" she snapped.  
"Oink, oink," said Ubbe. You love me anyway. I know you do!"  
Meg grabbed Ubbe by his twin orbs imperial and squeezed them.  
"Oh, I know you do...." said Ubbe just as there was a knock on the door. He decided to make whoever was pounding on the door wait until they were done, then grabbed a kaftan that had been tossed on the floor the night before and a fur robe, and quickly smoothed his hair.  
"How are my teeth?" he asked his wife.  
"They're passable, but you should clean them with salt and charcoal like Bjorn does," said Meg. She paused, and fumbled under the bed. "If you're sitting in state you might want to wear this," she said. In her hands she held Ubbe's crown. It was not a big crown, or particularly ornate, but it was heavy and Ubbe hated wearing it.His father had never worn a crown and neither did his half-brother Bjorn, but in some cases Ubbe deemed such an item necessary because it reminded that since Father had died and Mother had been murdered by Father's bitch of a first wife, who had then been deposed and exiled. Her son had then willingly abdicated and fled to Constantinople. Two of Ubbe's remaining brothers had departed to parts unknown, and one had departed from this world as a result of a family argument at the dinner table that had turned ugly. Ubbe did not really miss his brothers....least of all Ivar, who had ended that dispute by literally burying the hatchet in Sigurd's ribs, but the throne of Norway was extremely uncomfortable and Ubbe was sure he'd get piles from sitting on it, as well as an ulcer from all the stress he got running Kattegat.   
Magrethe straightened Ubbe's crown, kissed him, and curtseyed teasingly. "The Royal Council awaits, Your Majesty!" she said.  
Ubbe sighed, and shlumped down the hall wishing he could abdicate and join his brother in Constantinople. At least it was warmer there!

The Council was composed of a score of nobles, several volvae and godis, representatives of the various mercantile guilds and a representative of the Catholic church. The Tir Manannan Twins now alternated their duties, taking it in turns serving as the Bishop of Kattegat (a nominal title, as the Catholic community of Kattegat consisted of fifty people who met in a tent because their church still had no roof) and watching over a grisly band of female war criminals that had accompanied Bjorn's mother to a dismal island off the coast of Caledonia. Ubbe wasn't entirely sure which Twin was serving in Kattegat, but he thought it was Lucas, and the funk of sweat, garlic, whiskey and what might have been the odour of piety but smelled more like the stench of a man who sublimated his innate aggression towards the rest of humanity until it sweated out of his pores had already begun to fill the Great Hall when Ubbe entered. "Good morning, Your Grace!" he said.  
"Good enough," said Lucas. An extremely large, white cat stalked into the hall and laid a dead rat at his feet, then sat down and had a wash. "At least someone's found some meat. The food shortages are making people testy. How's Queen Meg?"  
"Testy," said Ubbe. "She doesn't like it when I eat beans."  
Lucas snorted "And you Norse think celibacy is a bad idea! At any rate, the council is probably going to discuss who the rightful Earl of Hedeby is. The mother of Lagertha's pet girl is trying to claim it despite the fact that the previous fact that previous Earless had no legal right to it in the first place, having produced no heir to Earl....damn it, was his name Sigvard or Sigthenn? I can't keep track of all the people Queen Big Hair has killed!"  
"Never mind," said Ubbe. "She fucked him and then killed him, then did the same to his legal successor, and to the next poor bastard down the line until there wasn't a branch left on the family tree!"  
"Not for three generation," said Lucas "But I found that the Earl had a surviving cousin on his mother's side of the family."  
"Who is it? asked Ubbe.  
"His name is Skallagrim Skalisson. You may remember him from Lagertha's trial. He was screaming for her to be hung from her own gallows on account of her hanging his pregnant daughter."  
"Oh, Frig!" said Ubbe. "Not the Big Cheese! He's a..."  
"He's a decent, honest man and a Christian," said Lucas. "I baptized him myself, in fact!" He had a sharklike grin on his face.  
"Is this how you're punishing me for not giving you funds for that roof?"  
Lucas shook his head, but his grin got even wider. "The alternative is to give the Earlship to the mother of Lagertha's pet girl. She says that Lagertha wanted to make Astrid her heiress, and used her son as a surrogate to produce a child to legitimize her claim."  
"That's dubious," said Ubbe "seeing that Bjorn wasn't heir to the Earldom of Hedeby....in fact, his claim to the throne of Norway could be questioned, because Father gained the throne with Mother's hel AFTER Bjorn's mother left him. In short, that bitch hasn't got a leg to stand on. What's the problem?"  
"She's an awful woman," said George "and the godis and volvae are on her side, on account of the fact that Skallagrim's been washed in the blood of the Lamb.  
"Oh, Frig!" said Ubbe"Never mind the fact that Lagertha killed one of their own and drove the rest out of Kattegat when she usurped the throne! I'm tempted to abdicate and hand the leadership of Norway over to a body of elected officials!"  
"Resist the temptation," said Lucas "because if you do so, sooner or later some chump will take your place and he'll fuck things up even worse than you would!"


	2. The Big Cheese

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we meet Skallagrim Skalison, aka The Big Cheese, and Kyllikylli Taapiolan makes a return visit to Kattegat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is actually no evidence that Vikings wore tattoos, but there's archaeological evidence that they sometimes filed their teeth into points. There's also many references in Classical sources (e.g:Tacitus) to barbarian women either flashing their tits as an aggressive gesture or fighting completely nude!  
> Norwegians consider lutefisk a delicacy...don't ask me why, because it's horrible!  
> Vikings also never wore horned helmets, but Finnish women sometimes wear double-peaked felt hats trimmed with fur.  
> "Naranga" is the Sanskrit word from which the word for "orange" is derived in all modern European languages

The Council ruled in favour of Skallagrim Skalison. Ubbe suspected that this was because The Big Cheese had bribed the representatives of the Merchant's Guild with dairy produce, and in times of famine the promise of fresh butter and cheese were not to be sneered at. Skalison came up to shake Ubbe's hand. He was a corpulent man who smelled and looked rather like a cheese himself, and wore a cross carved from narwhal ivory around his neck and had filed his teeth into points. He thanked Ubbe, and presented him with a gift wrapped cheese. "It's good with walnuts and dried fruit," he said "and I will be bringing more more. Grain, too.....there's a lot of hungry people in Kattegat."  
"I'm sure you'll make a handsome profit," said Ubbe.  
Skallagrim nodded. "I can't always act out of Christian charity. I have a business to run and a daughter to mourn." He sighed, bowed his head and clasped his hands. "I never should have allowed Ilsey to join Queen Lagertha's shield wives. What that bitch did to her was inhuman."  
"She did terrible things even to her own son," said Ubbe.   
Astrid's mother Uma suddenly emerged from the crowd and spat in Ubbe's face. Astrid had been a skinny, gangrel creature and her mother was much the same only much older and shrivelled like a dried apple. She smelled like lutefisk and wore almost as much eyeliner as Floki the Carpenter, and on her it was even less appealing.  
"Cocksucking Christers!" she shrieked. "You're gonna pay for what you did! From Hell's black heart I stab at thee!" She pulled open her bodice, revealing stretch-marked breasts that sagged almost to her waist, and hooted like an owl, slapping her chest and waggling her tongue and then she wheeled around and bounded out of the Great Hall yelling at the top of her lungs.  
Lucas shrugged. "Better to abide under a corner of a roof than share a house with a contentious woman...." he said. "At least she saw herself out. I really rather feel sorry for her.  
"I don't" said Ubbe. "I need a beer!"

As promised, the Cheese brought much-needed food to Kattegat, and sold it at a price that was less than bold-faced robbery. He even sold rye flour to Ubbe at a reduced price, so it could be distributed for free to the poorest citizens of Kattegat, because in the end all of Norse society rested on the shoulders of the peasants, and if they did not survive until the next harvest there probably would not be another one, and the peasants subsisted mainly on bear, beans and rye bread in the winter. By the time the ice melted on the fjord, other merchants returned to Kattegat, and one morning Margarethe went to the window to air out the room and let out a startled squeak because an antlered head thrust itself through the window, licked her face and then snatched an apple from the bowl that Ubbe kept beside the bed.  
"Hey!" he said. "those are in short supply these days! Um, hello Kyllikylli."  
Another head, this one wearing a peculiar double-peaked hat peered in above the reindeer's antlers. Kyllikylli had eyes like two silver coins at the bottom of a well, and could drink men twice her size under the table. Ubbe knew she was a friend of his half-brother Bjorn, but had never really understood what the relationship was between them aside from the fact that Kylli could always be expected to bring copious amounts of vodka to a feast and was an excellent kantele player. Ubbe wasn't sure if Bjorn had ever done the nasty with her or not, but the fact that Kylli could probably walk under Bjorn's outstretched arms without ducking and resembled a squirrel on magic mushrooms the idea of the pair of them together was really rather ridiculous. Kylli had pulled a transparent disc set in a wooden frame from one of her many pockets and was looking at Ubbe through it. It made her eye look huge.  
"What is that?" asked Ubbe "Some sort of magic?"  
"It's called a magnifying lens. They're used by jewellers and lace makers and other people who do fine work. The best are made in Arabia and are hard to come by. It helps to change your perspective from time to time." The lens went back into whatever pocket it came from. "Why are you staring at me and chortling? Kylli asked.  
"Never mind!" said Ubbe. "Anyway, how is Bjorn?"  
"Busy. He's got his Work Wife and his Fun Wife both dogging him constantly. He found out that it's not a good idea to leave Bellona alone for too long because she gets grumpy and bored without him and does unpredictable things. She sacked Pisa for no damn good reason just before I left, and Bjorn had to intervene before she made a move on Rome. Evidently, the sight of an extremely large red-haired woman riding around in nothing but a coating of lanolin and a lot of gold jewellery reminds Italians of the Iceni revolt and causes them to panic."  
The mental image that flashed across Ubba's brain made him chortle. "Either that or it's difficult to fight with an erection. I guess she's the Fun Wife."  
"Yo!" said Kylli. "At any rate, the boys and I are back in Kattegat, and I brought you a present." Kylli had a mesh bag tied to her saddle-bow, full of round fruit the colour of flame."  
"They're called naranga" she said "You peel the skin off before you eat them."  
Magrethe pulled out a naranga and sniffed it. "They smell lovely," she said "and they're almost too nice to eat."  
"If you don't eat 'em they'll spoil," said Kylli. "and you need to eat fruit 'cos you've got a bun in the oven."  
Ubbe looked at Magrethe. Her stomach was always a bit rounded as any healthy girl's stomach should be, but it was a little bit rounder than usual.  
"You're about three months along," said Kylli. "You'll be as big as a moose by Midsummer, and a new mum by harvest." Big silver eyes glimmered under the fur band of that ridiculous hat. "Trust me, I know. It doesn't take the Sybil of Cumae to tell when a girl is knocked up!"


	3. Midsummer Mayhem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Kattegat experiences six months of peace which is utterly shattered on Midsummer's Eve

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Midsummer's Eve (also called Yuhanos or The Feast of John The Baptist) is still celebrated across Northern Europe and in Quebec...and even if nothing catches fire, the hangovers sometimes last until Canada Day!  
> Lucas is quoting a jumbled mash of the Book of Lamentations and that of Revelations.   
> Finns still practice a form of shamanism that resembles Shintoism or Native American shamanism more than it does popular neo-paganism (e.g:Wicca) and suggests that they might have had some contact with either Northern Asia or the Americas centuries before other Europeans are supposed to have had contact with these cultures, and yoiking sounds almost EXACTLY like Inuit throat singing!

As spring rolled into summer, Magrethe did indeed grow rounder and rounder, and as eggs, fish and dairy began to replace beans as the primary source of protein things began to seem brighter, though it would likely that that winter would always be known as that of The Terrible Flatulence due to the meat shortage. The Big Cheese had made a handsome donation to the Church, so the modest structure that Ubbe's half-brother Bjorn had started building before his mother had made her cockeyed attempt to usurp the throne of Norway would finally have a roof, and was consecrated at Midsummer. Margarethe had declared that she wished to be baptized on the same day, and Ubbe watched the proceedings with considerable misgivings. "It seems like a bloody strange religion to me. You'd think a faith invented by a carpenter would be mostly about wood, but except for the table and the box that Lucas put under it, there was no carpentry involved. What was in that box?"  
"Um...." said Kylli. "That was your father's friend Aethelstan. Part of the agreement Bjorn made with the Vatican was to have Aethelstan declared a saint. Now he's the patron saint of your new church. Believe it or not, it was Floki's idea."  
Ubbe grunted "Now what?"  
"We go watch your wife get dunked in the harbour. It's a sort of symbolic bath."  
"Meggie's not dirty," said Ubbe "She had a sauna yesterday!"  
"It's symbolic, not actual. That's well....it's like the difference between magic and science. I explained it to you at some point. Magic and science and religion are three different things."  
"You were drunk," said Ubbe "and made no sense at all."  
Kylli sighed. "After the baptism I'm going to have to gent drunk and explain it to you again. To tell the truth, I have trouble explaining things to Norwiggers unless I'm at least mildly inebriated."  
A small girl of about eight ambled out into the middle of the road. She was staring at her fingers and giggling, and walked right into Ubbe.  
"You all right, honey?" asked Kyllikylli. The little girl looked her straight in the eye and uttered a shrill squeak and then ran away. "That's been happening a lot lately," Kylli explained. "Have you noticed? People have been acting strangely!"  
"More so than is usual in Kattegat?" asked Ubbe.  
Kylli nodded.

The Great Hall was full of drunk, happy Norse enjoying their first real feast since last fall. Everyone from the smallest child to the ancient crones who sat nodding together in a circle had eaten their fill not only of beans or fish but also of meat, and drunk entire barrels not just of beer or mead but of wine from France and vodka shipped in from Helsinki and a few even more exotic treats like coffee and dates and naranga fruit, and after a rather mediocre performance of ventriloquism by Lars and his Real Girl, Kyllikylli brought out her kantele and started to play. Unfortunately, her performance was marred by a couple of fights that broke out in the audience. The Bishop of Kattegat sat in a corner nursing a black eye and eating a smorbrod. "What is it with you people?" he asked. "I just asked that lady over there to do up her blouse, and she called me a buckethead and punched me in the face. I think she's drunk."  
The woman in question was about sixty years old. She had resumed dancing, and her breasts were still out. They looked like two globs of unbaked bread dough.  
"You're lucky she didn't boob you." said Ubbe. "But yeah, she's on the sauce. Everyone here is on the sauce...and some of them are on 'shrooms, too. What's your point?"  
"It's shameful," Lucas said as a much younger woman tumbled in his lap and started licking his face. He stared the girl straight in the face and said "NO! What you're doing is a violation of my personal space!"   
The girl giggled and started boobing him. Ubbe gritted his teeth. He had heard about the inappropriate familiarities that Bjorn's bitch of a mother had taken with the cleric that had been interred that day under the altar of Kattegat's church. By all accounts, Aethelstan had been a gentle person, but the Caledonian missionary was of an entirely different character, and was built like the proverbial stone privy and had had some of the same vocal training as a skald, so the stentorian bellow that Lucas let out was deafening at close quarters. "BABYLON! BABYLON HAS FALLEN!" The drunk girl tumbled to the floor and hit her head on the edge of the fire pit as Lucas lurched to his feet. The pupils of his eyes were as big as eggs, and as he began to rant he swayed in a peculiar dance, stamping his feet and pounding his chest with his fists. Ubbe realized that the cleric was higher than a kite....in fact, it was plain that most of the people in the Great Hall were tripping balls.  
"Well, he's completely mithered," said Kyllikylli. "Who slipped him the 'shrooms?" Some people thought it was hilariously funny to feed hallucinatory mushrooms to unsuspecting people. Floki had liked to do it to Aethelstan, and it had probably been Ivar who had periodically done it to the Tir Manannan Twins....but nobody knew or really wanted to know where Ivar had gone, and from the looks of things whoever had done it had drugged most of the population of Kattegat.  
"Shut the fuck up, Christer!" Uma waded through the crowds. "You make me sick! Go back to Asshole Island and suck cock!"  
Lucas looked at her with wide black eyes, and stood as immobile as a tombstone. "Her filthiness is in her skirts. She remembereth not her final end.....the Adversary has put out his hand over her pleasant things...." he hissed, but because of his vocal training his voice could be heard across the Great Hall. Uma punched him in the face, and there was a terrific roar from the fifty or so citizens of Kattegat who had been baptized and washed in the blood of the Lamb. Blood trickled from Lucas's nose and mouth.  
"What I've got in my skirts is none of your damn business, peckerwood!" Uma shrieked. Then she hit him again.  
"For Frig's sake, Kylli!" Ubbe hissed. "He's off his nut! Get him out of here before we've got another martyrdom on our hands....oh, shit!"  
Skallagrim Skalison rushed forward, swinging a stool and yelling "Come and get it, you inbred twat! Ya want a piece of the Cheese?" His eyes were wild, his round face was crimson and his pointed teeth were bared in a feral grin, the classic sign of a man on the edge of a berserker fit. He sunk his teeth into the leg of the stool, leaving deep dents in the wood.  
"Not a martyrdom...a blood bath!" Kylli whispered as Uma picked up a large serving fork and began to stab The Big Cheese with it several times. Kylli grabbed a towel from a terrified thrall and dunked it in an ewer of water as her brothers clustered around Meggie and Lucas, with Kylli beating a rear guard with a wet towel that was a potentially deadly weapon in her hands. The air filled with the smell of singed hair as Granny Tits enveloped Ubbe in a crushing embrace.  
"OH SHIT! OH sHIT! OH SHIT! OH SHIT!" He thought as he passed out. "The Gods will laugh at me if I die tonight..."

Lucas chanted the words of the Hebrew Prophets and of John of Patmos because this turned the uncleanness in his stomach into silver spiders that scampered out of his mouth and tried to hide in the sacks of rye in the granary where the silver-eyed Finnish witch and her brothers had dragged him. He fought them, but Pekko and Jussi had held him down, and after it was determined that no one had followed them out of the Great Hall (the roof of which had been set ablaze) Kylli ordered her remaining brothers to go back in and try to rescue anyone trapped inside, and then proceeded to squat down on Lucas's chest with her little white-booted feet under his armpits and began to yoik quietly, her amber and ivory and wooden beads clacking gently as she swayed back and forth. Her song turned into golden bees that pursued the spiders and destroyed them. Lucas decided it was better to lie still and try not to think about the fact that Kylli never wore pants, and for some reason stroking the white reindeer skin of her boots and hearing her voice was soothing even though he knew she was performing magic that was even older and stranger than that of the Norse. Eventually, Lucas dozed off, and when dawn broke he found that Kylli had gotten up and was crawling around the granary looking at things through her magnifying glass.  
"Just stay where you are," she said. 'You had a bad trip, Lucas. The boys managed to get Ubbe and the Cheese out of the Great Hall along with most of the others. The Cheese lost a great deal of blood , but luckily for him he's so fat that the toasting fork did not penetrate any vital organs, and Ubbe's got a few cracked ribs but they'll live.  
Lucas groaned. "I feel like shit. What are you doing?"  
"I'm looking at things from a different perspective," Kylli said. "See these black grains, Lucas? Do you know what they are?" she held out a palm full of kernels and handed Lucas her magnifying glass.  
"No, said Lucas. "What are they?"  
"They're ergot. It's a kind of fungus that grows on grain, especially on rye. There was an outbreak here last year, which was why Bjorn had to have most of the crop destroyed....but there was no report of a similar outbreak in Hedeby. I guess Queen Big Hair never thought to inspect her own stock, and neither did Skallagrim Skalison. Ergot makes people hallucinate. I suspected something of this sort when I ate a smorbrod and I started seeing numbers falling from the sky an hour later. The rest....well, you remember the rest!"  
"Not all of it," said Lucas.  
"Anyway," said Kylli. Ubbe's going to have to hold another trial to determine if Earl Skalison can be held criminally responsible for sending most of the population of Kattegat on a collective bad trip."  
"Sounds like the Cheese is about to get toasted," said Margarethe. "Come to think of it, I'm hungry. I'd kill for a nice slab of toasted cheese right now. She got up and waddled out of the granary.  
Kyllikylli shrugged. "Well, she's pregnant. I better go help her find what she wants!"


End file.
